Walter A. Maier - Concordia Theological Seminary

Concordia Theological Seminary

In 1922, Maier accepted the call to become Professor of Old Testament History and Interpretation at Concordia Theological Seminary. At 29 years of age he was the youngest person to hold the rank of full professor in the institution’s eighty-three year history. In order to take this post in St. Louis, Maier resigned as executive secretary of the Walther League, but retained the responsibility of editor for the Messenger. Here Maier was known as “a bear in the classroom, but a prince at home,” by the generation of young seminarians to whom he expounded the Hebrew language and Old Testament exegesis. The same Professor Maier who kept impeccably high standards in the classroom was also known for inviting entire classes of students – sometimes over 100 strong – into his home for meals and entertainment.

In 1926 Concordia Seminary moved from an inadequate campus in southern St. Louis into a newly constructed facility west of St. Louis in fashionable suburban Clayton. The new Seminary consisted of seventeen buildings of Tudor-Gothic architecture, designed by the firm of Day and Klauder, which had just completed a similar project for Princeton University. The predominately limestone construction, with pink Boulder stone, blue gray Zell stone, and bluish slate roofs, is a St. Louis tourist attraction even today. But of especial significance for the Maier family was the trim, two story house of vermillion and ochre brick with steeply slanted slate roof located at Eleven Seminary Terrace. This pleasant dwelling on the Concordia campus was to be Maier’s residence for the rest of his life.